One of the more frequent requests for new functionality on the site (remind
me to get back to this topic later on in this column) is for ratings for
other levels of play besides Division I. I've never been able to do that,
because I don't have the resources to gather full score data for the other
divisions (covering NCAA Division II, NCAA Division III, and the NAIA would
essentially get everybody), and there aren't any reasonable rating measures
that don't require full or nearly full score data. There's some hope on
that front; I've had discussions with one of my score sources about
potential plans to add other levels for the 2005 season, but for now it's
just not going to be done yet.

Sometimes, though, those requests segue into a question that I can try to
answer -- how much overlap is there between the other divisions and
Division I? Usually this gets phrased as, "Don't you think < insert
name of writer's favorite local school> would beat up on most D1 teams
if they got the chance?" Usually, the answer is, "Probably not," but there
certainly is a considerable bit of overlap between the divisions. The
secondary questions, then, include things like, "How would the D2 national
champ do in D1 in any given year?" and, "Are there a few lower-division
teams that are really out of place?"

The second one's fairly easy ("No, mostly."), so I'll start there. In any
given year, the same handful of teams tend to show up in the World Series
for each of the three divisions in question, but no more so than in Division
I. The one possible exception (the "mostly" above) is Lewis-Clark State,
who has won four of the last five NAIA titles. However, they're usually
reasonably pressed to do so, and they haven't posted outrageously great
regular-season records against NAIA teams, so I don't think they're that
extreme an outlier.

On the first question, there's some anecdotal evidence from teams that have
moved up to Division I and competed well that indicates that the top teams
in Division II or the NAIA might not be that far from the top teams in
Division I. UC Riverside is the most extreme example; they went from
Division II in 2000 to being a legitimate top 10 team in Division I in 2003.
Birmingham-Southern won the NAIA title in 2001 and has moved to the middle
of the pack for the Big South, which puts them around the middle of the pack
for all of Division I. Dallas Baptist, which isn't really even in Division
I yet, was #33 in this week's ISR's, although they'll move down as more teams
reach the 10-game qualifying level and move in ahead of them. I'm not
convinced that these examples constitute compelling proof, though, because
they were able to recruit with the move to Division I as a selling point;
that should have improved their teams in a way that teams staying in a lower
level couldn't rely on.

Given that evidence, though, it's worth it to run a little study and see
what we get. What I've done is to take all teams who were not in Division
I at any point in the last five full seasons but who played at least ten
games against Division I teams and look at their records in those games.
As expected, the overall trend favors the D1 teams, but here are the best
records looked at three different ways:

What I have labelled as "fISR" here is something that I may start using a
bit when it's handy -- it's a fake ISR computed by taking the average of the
actual ISR's for a team's opponents over a given span and adjusting it by
the winning percentage in those games (it's the same thing I did last week
in computing the quality of a 10-game start by looking at the whole year's
ratings). It's not a real ISR because inserting a new team would change
everyone's ratings slightly, but it's close enough to give you a good feel
for how a team has performed in a given set of games.

There's a small problem with evaluating these numbers that shows up right
at the top of the last two lists -- with the exception of a few of the
California teams, the top Division I teams just don't play non-D1 teams
very often, and that makes it hard to get the context right. Delta State
epitomizes that -- in the five years in question, they beat Ole Miss one
time and won two of three against Nicholls State, and they went 22-0
against SWAC teams. In short, it looked a lot like last year's Southern
Jaguars' season, and I had no idea how good they were, either. On the one
hand, the fISR number is not particularly out of line with the teams
behind them. On the other hand, Delta State has made several trips to the
D2 CWS recently but hasn't won one, so it's doubtful that they're actually
going to legitimately end up at the top of the list. Interestingly, many
of the top D2 teams seem to never play D1 teams, either, so there could
actually be D2 teams better than this.

Having taken that particular pinch of salt, though, I would say that
Lewis-Clark State's ranking certainly looks reasonable; they've played
67 games (that I can find) against Division I teams with a good but
not great winning percentage, which is enough to make me comfortable
with this.

That leads me to a comfortable answer to the original question -- an ISR
like those above would put a team in the #50-#60 range and give them about
a 10% chance of beating the #1 team most years. In other words, the top of
Division II and the NAIA is comfortably below the top of Division I, but
the overlap is considerable.

New Functionality

I'm often accused of trying to hide stuff on the site. That's not true,
of course, but a lot of folks come in directly to Breadcrumbs or to the
ratings, and that causes them to miss things in the Filing Cabinet, for
example. I work to cut down on the number of clicks it takes to find a
particular piece of information, but that minimizes your chances for
finding something by serendipity. Anyway, what I wanted to point out here
are a couple of things in The Filing Cabinet that I'm
doing this season. First of all, the game
scores database is being updated weekly when I do the ratings. There
are still faster sources for scores online, and I have no interest in
competing with them, but this is intended to be handy for researchers or
those doing their own rating systems. Secondly, I've set it up so that
the hitters and
pitchers databases are updating daily
with 2004 stats. This is done by an automated process that pulls the
stats reports from all the team Web sites (many thanks to Paul Kislanko
for his help in identifying all of those), so I don't have as much
control as I usually like over the contents, but I think the value added
is worth letting a little of that go. There are about thirty teams which
don't have current reports up yet, and almost nobody updates daily, of
course, but I think the ability to do in-season leader lists or prospect
analysis is worth a little noise in the signal. As always, feedback is
welcomed and, indeed, begged for.

Pitch Count Watch

Rather than keep returning to the subject of pitch counts and pitcher
usage in general too often for my main theme, I'm just going to run a
standard feature down here where I point out potential problems; feel
free to stop reading above this if the subject doesn't interest you.
This will just be a quick listing of questionable starts that have
caught my eye -- the general threshold for listing is 120 actual pitches
or 130 estimated, although short rest will also get a pitcher listed if
I catch it. Don't blame me; I'm just the messenger.